This Week in Anime

Does the Harem End in a Moan, or a Whimper?

Jean-Karlo
You too, huh? The darnedest thing, because I spent all week watching World's End Harem and it's like the show is on some weird filtered cable channel. Talk about bit rot!

So I guess we gotta talk about this show as best we can, in spite of not being able to see a whole chunk of it.

The concept reminds me a ton of Y: The Last Man, which doesn't feel good because I never really liked that graphic novel. Our protagonist Reito, who is a cellular biologist, is put into cold sleep for a few years after being diagnosed with a condition called Cellular Sclerosis. When he wakes up five years later, not only is his also-a-cellular-biologist crush Erisa missing, it turns out that an epidemic of the MK Virus has culled half of the population. Specifically, the male half, because "MK" stands for "Male Killer."

We'll... get back to that "porn"-thing...

But yes: 99.9% of all men are dead and precious few remain alive (it seems everyone with cellular sclerosis has an immunity to the MK Virus). There are other men in cold sleep, but they can't be safely awakened until the virus is cured, and they can only stay in cold sleep for about another year anyway. So in a twist that no doubt has Shinzo Abe giddy, Reito and the other guys are tasked by the gubernatorial body UW ("United Women") to "mate" with as many women as possible in the hopes of breeding a generation of boys and girls immune to the virus.

I'm reminded of Saber Marionette J in how goofily-contrived the situation is. Artificial insemination won't work, apparently, because the Kool-Aid man is red or whatever. They can't use the leftover genetic material of other men because the resulting boys die of the MK Virus within days of birth. And with all the technology available to the world (it's a post-scarcity world circa 2045), they can't genetically engineer boys. At least that last point makes sense (all fetuses start their development as female until a certain point in gestation), but regardless the only way out is for the remaining men to "mate" with as many women as possible.

I use "mate" in quotes because that's the specific term they use in the show. "Mating." Not "having sex," not "breed," not even "fucking." "Mating." It's skin-crawling, like people who exclusively refer to women as "females." They're not even using the Japanese word for "mating."

A wrench is thrown into the whole affair because Reito is hung up on Erisa; if he has to "mate," he wants her to be the first. And wouldn't you know it, Erisa is missing, so Reito has to stave off the advances of all his politically-appointed caretakers. Also, in a bit of genius, he reasons that it's better to find a cure for the MK Virus so that all of the men in cold sleep can help repopulate the world and the burden isn't put on three pairs of testes.

I see the throughline in that: you're murdering genetic diversity if most of your kids come from just three guys (I read somewhere that you'd need a minimum of 250 breeding pairs of people if you wanted to keep a safe level of genetic diversity among humans after a mass extinction event). But in practice it just feels like a bit of a creepy incel plot when Reito has to turn down all these women who are nuts about his nut.

And it's not like they somehow can't do it; the other two men we see in this show, Hino and Doi, are just fine in their hentai-plot roles. Hino requests actresses and models be brought to him at his request, while the first thing Doi does is fulfil his "hot-for-teacher" fantasy and pop his cherry with his sexy piano instructor.

Doi is a particularly weird case: his handler sets up a school filled with girls who are dying to jump Doi's bones and even sets up a rotating shift for the girls so everyone gets a shot at sleeping with him. Also, for some reason, Doi is introduced in the third episode, and the plot to the show has to be spelled out again when we already know about the central conceit.

I know it's gotta work with what the manga set up, but a smarter creative vision would have mixed Doi's introduction with Reito's and compared and contrasted their reactions: Reito with his outright rejection of "being a stud horse", and Doi being overwhelmed with the idea while also foreshadowing his eventual acceptance of it. Sure, you're committing the sin of "changing the story," but pacing people...

Again, I've been around the seedier parts of the internet for long enough that Reito's plot of fighting off the advances of horny women just feels wrong, like it's feeding into some weird rhetoric.

The excuse that Reito wants to save himself for Erisa feels hollow. I'd go into how sex and love aren't the same thing, but I feel like this show is of the logic that sex workers are inherently unfaithful by the very nature of their job and that's not a line of thinking I want to entertain.

I don't wanna think of how much whiskey would burn in that area... But at any rate, it's also right of Reito to do that because apparently the MK Virus was—wait for it—man-made.

Oh-freaking-joy. A man-made virus designed to cull the population. That's totally not the sound of me gargling apoplectically in [waves hands around him]

The World's End Harem predates our current situation by a few years, so it's for sure not a statement on anything. But I've got such a knee-jerk reaction to any and all conspiracy theories so uh... get bent, World's End Harem.

Oh hey, it's the first episode to Terraformars! The show does have a bit of a fake-out I need to give it credit for: Reito is assigned a nurse and a bodyguard, and at first it appears that tall, buxom Akane is the bodyguard while the diminutive Sui is the nurse. Turns out, it's the other way around.

Also, Reito's handler Suou has a running gag of eating a lot but all the weight goes to her boobs. Though there's as of yet no explanation why she looks like Erisa with white eyelashes.

If I had a nickel for every time a slovenly-yet-well-endowed woman named "Akane" was the best girl from an anime I watched, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice, right?

Up top is Maria, a foreign scientist who is shy around men but also gets very cute and verbose when talking about viruses. I will be taking this bit of Neurodivergent representation and you will have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Also, the show establishes that Maria's little sister is one of the girls in Doi's classroom/harem. Rea, on the other hand, is the "This guy is a pervert and even if he's doing something innocent I'll twist it into him being a pervert" archetype and apparently she resents Reito because she's been carrying a torch for Suou for a long time. Both are assigned to Reito because the shadowy council of women that head the UW are disappointed in Suou for failing to successfully jump Reito's bones.

There's supposed to be some kind of intrigue at play but the underlying mystery just isn't compelling at all. Especially not when their plot is "make these three guys mate with as many women as possible". There's sneaky stuff afoot with how they whisk away and "disappear" all virologists or microbiologists and divert all efforts away from curing the MK virus towards other things like food production, but so what? Also, apparently, they also spirit away all women who get knocked up by the guys, for... whatever reason.

I imagine the logic is something like "a post-scarcity society was too complacent so we killed 99.9% of all humans to produce men of better stock", which is definitely some bullcrap rhetoric. And I feel like this kind of thing was better-handled in Mass Effect 2: the bottleneck isn't making better people, it just means fewer people survived. Also-also, genocide sucks, maybe?

Also-also-also, referring to the men as "numbers" makes me think of Dr. Weil's Numbers from Mega Man Zero 3.

The show seems a lot more interested in Doi's antics with his school harem than even Reito's investigation into the virus. In the eight episodes we've watched, Doi gets the lion's share of attention, even though Reito is honestly doing more. Him investigating patient zero for the MK Virus and patient zero's wife being assassinated (she was also in communication with Erisa) just feel like afterthoughts. But Doi gets a lot of the narrative weight.

So, Doi's deal is that before the virus he was a nerd who loved an idol group, Q's. He also got bullied really, really badly. Even after five years in cold sleep, his bruises remain.

His handler, Karen, sets up a school setting filled with girls that want to sleep with Doi, even though Doi only really has eyes for his teacher. Once she's removed from the picture (apparently a week of daily boning did the trick), Doi gets rotated through all the other girls and eventually starts actually catching feelings for some of them. Eventually, a girl named Shion is transferred into his class; this is important, because the now-23-years-old Shion was a classmate of Doi's who wanted to break into showbusiness. If Doi can get her pregnant, she has an easy in with the UW's productions. Because Shion never helped Doi when he was bullied, Doi takes the opportunity to humiliate her in revenge.

There's a bit where one of the girls in his harem points out that even though everyone in Doi's current class is also competing with each other to have his kid, they're all at least actual friends so nobody is taking it personally; Shion is just there to get a leg up, so Doi's pettiness is excused? It's still really weird revenge-fantasy stuff that's a little skin-crawling, but Shion is still marked as an opportunist who's desperate for fame. It's when Doi gets a taste for revenge that things get gross.

Erika up there was one of Doi's old bullies, and she dated the guy that personally gave him cigarette burns and such. I think the show also judges her in a totally stupid way for also having had sex with the guy before the MK virus hit (which is a laugh, considering the central conceit of this show). In the five years since Doi went into cold sleep, she fell on hard times and also apparently got addicted to drugs, so Doi keeps her chained up in his room so she can watch him have sex with his classmates and also get her next fix dangled over her head. Doi's reasoning is that all the bullying was five years ago for Erika but only a few weeks ago for him.

I wanna be charitable and point out that this is a valid plotline: character growth doesn't have to mean they become better people after all. The problem is that the show is framing Doi as justified and also throwing its weight behind his petty revenge. And it doesn't stop feeling gross as hell. It'd be one thing if this was supposed to build him up for some kind of act of villainy that Reito has to put a stop to. Instead, it's just the kind of misogynist mentality that already permeates a lot of hentai that feels really, really gross and weird.

Like, dude, I know you miss your teacher, I know the bruises are still fresh, and I know you're mad, but you've got an entire freaking classroom at your beck and call. There's "petty," and there's this middle school revenge fantasy crap. I'm praying the guy catches something and his schlong rots off.

The problem isn't that Doi's arc is a "fall from grace," it's that it's not a well-handled fall from grace.

We've gone from stuff like Agent Aika and Eiken shoving crotches into the camera like it was going out of style to panty-shots being censored. I'm not sure how to react; on the one hand, there was definitely a bit in the past decade or so where it felt like anime was getting too comfortable pushing the envelope to the bursting point, but now it's such that you can't even show tongue kissing. At that point, why are we watching? You're not even getting any boob jiggles out of the clothed boob, so what's the point? Plastic Little is right there...

I'm actually missing Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt here.

Late last week, I saw someone on Twitter disappointed that more of us here on ANN aren't "open degenerates" that like hentai or whatever, which makes me laugh. I'm a lot of things, but a prude ain't one of them. I'm saying this because I have a genuine appreciation for the adult side of the anime world—I follow a ton of Japanese artists on Twitter. It's a tragedy that there isn't any money for their stuff to get adapted as it could! A lot of hentai artists either get into making Shonen Jump manga about cooking (same thing as porn, really), or just live content with putting something out every Comiket or so. I'm old enough to where Burn Up Excess was formative for me, I lived through Queen's Blade and The Qwaser of Stigmata. Those shows aren't good in the conventional sense, but as your friend and mine Justin Sevakis once said, "Anime has always been filthy." It's a shame that... this is what we're reduced to.

There's a valid discussion to be had about how the Internet and culture as a whole have been weirdly sanitized, and while a lot of folks would point fingers they're all missing the point. The problem isn't sex being banned, the problem is that it's just not weird anymore. It's not allowed to be. Plastic Little had a jiggle-meter. Agent Aika billed itself as "having more panties than a Victoria's Secret catalogue". Our big, fancy superheroes on the silver screen are so chaste, you'd think they were brought in by storks as babies. Sex in general is just so sterilized and doesn't even account for the many, many experiences of folks out there. The topic of "sex in anime" is varied and messy and complicated but it's one I wish we could have because it's part and parcel to the whole thing. It's also very beyond the scope of This Week in Anime, and by extension World's End Harem, but man, this stuff just doesn't feel good. Time and place still matter, for sure, but this half-measure sexy is just plain bad. Like, even if you took out the bitrot in WEH, you're not left with a very sexy show—you just get a few shots of boob.

So you're absolutely right, Steve, the nature of sexy anime is really really complicated now and I wish it wasn't because as much as I love anime and how weirdo sci-fi like Eat-Man introduced me to bold storytelling, it's also the horny stuff like Rio getting a robot mosquito glued to her boobs that kept me around as a young'n.

There is no world where a guy getting shoved into a sexy, buxom volleyball player's swimsuit should be as dull and lifeless as it is in World's End Harem.

Yeah, I will say that something that has never been sexy is mixing anime with weirdo biotruthisms or rhetoric. A cult of orthodox priests fueled by mommy milkers, I'd take ten. Revenge fantasies, I'll gladly leave on the shelf next to What Dreams May Come.

I mean, we can't leave Hino out of the picture! It's not all funtimes and lollipops with him, apparently having any woman he wants is getting dull... so he sets his sights on Reito's little sister. Who, as the show points out, is sixteen. Full credit for pretty much everyone around Hino not humoring him at all.

The guy crashes and burns and it feels like this might lead to another villain arc for someone else, and like... at least this is something that antagonizes Reito directly?

If this is the best they have, maybe this world of harems should just end. Hit the button, start over someplace else.

For me, there's a fine tradition of lovingly-crafted trash out there. I think I can afford to be picky, so I'm content to delve the gutters seeking better trash.

And what a void it is.